


Whatever in love means

by Lilliburlero



Category: Grantchester (TV)
Genre: 1980s, Future Fic, M/M, Royal Wedding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-03
Updated: 2018-06-03
Packaged: 2019-05-17 19:44:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14838008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: 1981: Leonard and Daniel watch the Royal Wedding and drink gin.*To Kivrin's prompt: Leonard & Sidney, Knave. In fact, everyone's quite honourable, and Sidney appears only at the further end of a cathode ray tube, but I hope you enjoy it anyway!*Note: no Character Death as such, but Some Characters Are Dead; (reclaimed) homophobic slur.





	Whatever in love means

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kivrin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kivrin/gifts).



He can take his time. The sun’s so bright it doesn’t seem real and his ears are full of chirping. Everything smells of summer, grass and dust. The tartan rug is a magic carpet, and all around them the meadow, poppies and cornflowers and rock-roses.

Mam says, ‘Sit up nicely now, stop lolling about, and we’ll have a cup of tea.’

But he can take his time, enjoy another few seconds of warmth and total ease. He shuts his eyes; he can hear her unscrewing the Thermos, pouring. He sits up slowly, reluctantly, distantly aware that he won’t ever get to taste that tea, and the world lurches sideways, turns breeze-block grey and crushing. He can’t breathe, and then he can, and then his eyes won’t open, but they do, onto dog-roses on a trellis and sparrows smaller than the blooms; it’s wallpaper, wipe-clean vinyl wallpaper, not his own room, not the vicarage—

‘Leonard? Are you all right? Made you a cuppa.’

He rolled over to see Daniel sitting on the edge of the unfamiliar bed. He was fully dressed and holding out a mug. The light behind the mauve curtains at the dormer window was mid-morningish.

‘Yes—yes. I think. What time is it?’

‘Just gone ten.’

‘Oh heavens.’ Leonard scrambled to sit up: his whole body felt like it had been lightly coated in cement and left to dry.

‘It’s okay. We’re on holiday, remember?’

‘Mmm. But, what? Thirteen hours?’

‘It’s a start. You’ve got a lot to catch up on. Here.’

Leonard took the mug. It had a picture of a cartoon Cupid on it and the legend _Love thy neighbour… but don’t get caught!_

Daniel raised an eyebrow. ’Apropos, in a way. Our landlady has an interesting collection, of which that is very possibly the cleanest. Perhaps she feels obliged to, since it’s the seaside. I managed to pick an ingenious little number where the girl loses her bathing suit when you pour the hot water in.’

Leonard winced. ‘Oof.’ Daniel’s sensitivity to smut had grown more rather than less acute as the world had grown progressively smuttier.

‘Leuco paint. It’s actually quite interesting, the way it works, but I could have done without it at seven thirty ack emma.’

‘Oh, Daniel, I’m sorry. You should have woken me.’

‘No fear. You first real holiday in God knows how long—if even _He_ hasn’t forgotten.’

‘Oh dear, I do feel a bit awful about it. I can’t help feeling it looks slightly _pointed_ , missing the street party at home—especially after what I said about patriotic spectacle as a distraction from unemployment and the Brixton riots—’

‘I’d already booked! And cleared the time in _my_ peak season… I really don’t think looking nobly disinterested over a plate of fairy cakes and a Union Jack tablecloth was worth losing the deposit, the break and a week’s work.’

‘You’re right, of course.’ Leonard leaned over to kiss his cheek.

‘So are we watching it, then?’

‘Oh, I think we _have_ to—I’ll have to have some sort of opinion on Himself’s performance, if nothing else.’

Daniel stood up. ’Very well. You’ll find me downstairs cooking a filthy great fry-up. With a G&T in hand. You’re most welcome to join me. Black and white pudding optional, gin mandatory.’

‘ _Daniel_. At this time in the morning?’

‘Rot. What sort of Anglican vicar are you?’

Leonard chucked back the covers. ’The Lancashire sort. White pudding mandatory.'

 

* * *

 

_...for the first time, we see in all its glory, That Dress..._

‘It’ll look like a wet dishcloth after being crushed up in the coach…’

‘Oh dear, too frou-frou by far. That neckline and leg o’mutton sleeves—all wrong for such a tall, athletic girl.’

‘And that train; she must be pretty much immobilised.’

‘The bridesmaids are frantic, trying to untwist it, bless them.’

_...unadvisedly lightly or wantonly; but reverently, discreetly, soberly…_

‘No brute beasts, one can’t really expect them these days, but I do miss them a little bit. I don’t think I’ve given them house room since I married Sylvia and Jack. She absolutely insisted.’

‘Sylvia would, rest her soul. But even she balked at “obey.”’

‘Do you remember her giving what-for to the Irishman on the train from Crewe—’

‘And he said, “Janey Mac, and they want women _priests_!" Such a shame she’ll never see a woman ordained, after all her years of campaigning—’

‘Perhaps _we_ will. The shilly-shallying is daft. Absolutely no theological case against. At least she got to his enthronement—ooh, here we go—'

_…The Archbishop of Canterbury, The Most Reverend and Right Honourable Sidney Chambers…_

‘Not sure how I feel about the silver and blue diamanté. Corpse-like, against a fair complexion—a colour-correction filter could probably get it looking all right.’

_…if either of you know any impediment, why ye may not be lawfully joined together in matrimony, ye do now confess it…_

‘Goodness, did Sidney always sound so—so—’

‘So what?’

‘Well, so Home Counties…’

‘I suppose he did. He’s worn jolly well, hasn’t he? Those craggy types always do.’

‘The mitre covers over a multitude of comb-over…’

‘Leonard! I never thought you had so much cattiness in you. Just because you’ve kept yours—oh, isn’t she an absolute darling! That little shy smile…’

_…take thee, Philip Charles Arthur George…_

‘She’s fluffed it, poor dear.’

‘What a parapraxis, in front of millions… He’s got the same lugubrious long face as his papa, though, hasn’t he? Imagine having to look at that over kedgeree and the _Times_ for the next fifty years. Two hundred years ago he'd have had a _maîtresse en titre_ and she'd be bonking the riding master. Queen Victoria has a lot to answer for, domesticating them like that.’

_...O let the nations rejoice…_

The specially-composed setting of Psalm 67 was bland, the sort of Britten-and-soda that had been standard for devotional composition for twenty or thirty years, and to which only the very mouldiest of Anglican choral figs could object. Leonard wondered if the corridors of Lambeth Palace echoed to Jelly Roll Morton and Sidney Bechet these days—he hoped so. He had attended the enthronement, just over a year before, and written to wish his old incumbent well, but otherwise their correspondence had dwindled to Christmas cards bearing sincerely-meant but seldom-fulfilled promises to meet in the coming year, which had become ninety-sixty, ninety-seventy and now nineteen-eighty-odd with a frightening rapidity. Someone who didn’t know them might have seen a certain irony in Sidney’s advancement through academe and the bishopric of St Albans to the pinnacle of the hierarchy, set against Leonard’s series of depressed parishes, his small reputation for saying inconvenient things about poverty, prostitutes and publicans on regional radio or in the local papers. Chambers was supposed to be the maverick, Finch the retiring intellectual—but it hadn’t really worked out like that at all. 

Daniel grumbled softly about the camerawork, as if he might have done it better with his Super-8, and got up to make them both another gin and tonic.

_And now the Lesson will be read by the Speaker of the House of Commons…_

_...and have not love, I am become as sounding brass…_

‘I say,’ Daniel said, returning with tinkling glasses, ‘Tommy Twice, they called him in the valleys. And, I believe, in certain slightly unsavoury clubs on Wardour Street, in his day. Look at that extraordinary lace bib.’

‘He tests my patience just a bit: isn’t he rather a toady?’

‘Oh, the least of it, my dear.’

Daniel sat down.

‘Right, right—shh. This is it.’

_…The address will be given by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Primate of All England, Dr Sidney Chambers…_

He didn’t look comfortable, trapped behind microphone, altar-rail and lectern—Sidney clearly still hated having anything between him and the congregation, and he had never really taken to artificial amplification, much preferring to project his voice out of that barrel chest than modulate it to a PA system. He began a little uncertainly, with a platitude about happy-ever-afters in fairy-tales. The camera cut to the royal couple, who seemed to exchange an awkward word. They were so stiff, Leonard thought—he congenitally, she out of pure terror, probably—but he knew of long experience that demeanour on a wedding day was no predictor of success or otherwise in a marriage.

_…the place where the adventure really begins…_

Oh yes, he was still the old Sidney, clean-limbed, fair-minded, plain-spoken, synthesising the values of a minor public school with those of the postwar welfare state. It wasn’t going to be enough, Leonard felt with a daft sense of panic. Not with the Milk Snatcher in Number 10. But Sidney soon hit his stride—a touch of ecumenism with the reference to the Eastern Orthodox tradition, the subtle egalitarianism of suggesting not just that a prince and princess are first and foremost only a young couple in love, but that every young couple in love are royalty on their wedding day. It didn’t go nearly far enough, but it was carefully tuned to be audible to, without outraging, the Establishment, and judging by the arch, self-consciously amused posture of the Duke of Edinburgh, even the dullest pillars had ears to hear.

‘What are you grinning at?’ Daniel asked.

Leonard shook his head.

_…A marriage which really works is one which works for others…Those who are married live happily ever after the wedding day if they persevere in the real adventure which is the royal task of creating each other and creating a more loving world…_

How terrifyingly sincere he sounded—always Sidney’s greatest homiletic gift, but he must really believe this bit, because it was what he himself had done, disciplined himself to a respectable, front-facing sort of marriage, to the daughter of the Bursar at Starbridge College, where Sidney had been appointed Principal in 1960. Celia, a classical flautist with a distinguished concert career, was certainly no meek doormat—the fallout from her reluctance to move into Lambeth Palace was still gently, hilariously percolating though ecclesiastical gossip networks—but there wasn’t much of the free spirit in her. And there was ‘adventure’ again, appropriate to the theme of fairy-tale of course, but such an _Amanda_ word—‘come _on_ , Chambers! Where’s your sense of _adventure_?’—that you couldn’t help feel that Sidney was sternly redefining it to mean service and duty—intrepid, satisfying service and duty, but not, all the same, romance. He reached for Daniel’s hand and squeezed it.

_Many people seem to have surrendered to fatalism about the so-called inevitabilities of life: cruelty, injustice, poverty, bigotry, and war…_

It was hard to imagine that a Church of England under Sidney would be quite so class-distinction-democracy-and-proper-drains as in the past—word was that he’d had a tussle with Downing Street about the very date of his enthronement, which coincided with the Budget, and come out on top. But like many clergymen, he could be so awfully serene, as if he were not addressing poor people or the victims of bigotry, only the privileged who must practise charity. But when it came to war, he did speak from experience. First Archbishop of Canterbury to have killed fellow men in combat since Thomas à Becket, a fact every newspaper had gleefully printed at the time of his appointment.

The last time Leonard and Sidney had spoken properly, comfortably, over a drink, was after Geordie Keating’s funeral—that made it six years ago, heavens above. Sidney had delivered the address then, and he'd still looked rather shattered, shoulders sagging, eyes dull, the deep vertical lines in his cheeks sprouting here and there a patch of missed stubble, like tiny alpine herbs. Much as Leonard tried to supply analogies with his own friendships with women, or men to whom he had never felt any attraction (Sidney among them) there remained something essentially opaque about the profound affections of heterosexual men—

As Sidney drew to a close with another tactful reminder that kings and queens were only flesh and blood, Daniel sighed. ‘Well, he hasn’t lost his touch. Isn’t there something too relentless about the hetero, though, even for the most well-disposed old poof? Man and woman, bride and groom, king and queen, husband and wife, family family family family…’

‘Maybe we’ll change that too.’

‘Not, as my dad used to say, Pygmalion likely. I don't want to live in an institution. Come here.’ Their gin-flown embrace swallowed the couple’s progress to the high altar, the Lesser Litany and a portion of the prayers, though they came to themselves before the Lord’s Prayer and the blessing.

_…And now, a hymn chosen by the bride, ‘I Vow to Thee My Country’…_

‘Oh hell no,’ Daniel yelped. ‘I take it all back, she’s a harpy and harridan and a horror. Benign goodwill firmly revoked and sign me up with the Sex Pistols in a republican anarchist commune. Turn it down, do.’

Turning from the volume knob, Leonard asked, ‘School?’

‘Mm, and basic training and Church Parade.’

‘It is a _peculiar_ choice for a twenty-year-old on her wedding day. Laying upon the altar the dearest and the best, the love that pays the price and all that. I wouldn’t wonder if she didn’t feel rather a lamb to the slaughter, the press and public and so on.’

‘That’s about it, now, isn’t it? Oh—Sidney’s got another bit.’

‘The final blessing. Then signing the register—oh, I suppose the National Anthem’s in there somewhere—do you want to turn it off?’

‘Yes, I think so. Let’s go for a walk on the cliffs, blow the cobwebs away.’

But somehow they watched to the end, through Kiri Te Kanawa singing Handel in a startlingly unbecoming fondant-coloured costume and fussy hat (it seemed somehow very silly to apply the strictures of 1 Cor. 11:5 to an operatic soprano discharging a professional responsibility), the Prince and Princess of Wales emerging from the Dean’s Aisle to fanfare, Pomp and Circumstance No.4, the feudal cheers of the crowd, their departure in the open carriage. Neither Leonard nor Daniel spoke, comfortable in a quarter-century of constancy and companionship, mildly gin-sozzled, aware of the sacrifices and trials, the foibles and forgivenesses, the toils and truths that had got them this far, with some distance yet to go. They could take their time.

**Author's Note:**

> Title: from Charles's words at his and Diana's engagement interview with ITV.
> 
> The sources I used for the account of the wedding are [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgmpgvf1O44) and [this order of service](https://www.vanityfair.com/style/photos/2011/04/prince-charles-princess-diana-wedding-program-slide-show#11). Robert Runcie's address at the wedding is [here](https://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/30/world/our-prayer-for-charles-and-diana.html).
> 
> brute beasts: from The Form of Solemnization of Matrimony in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer: 'nor taken in hand, unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly, to satisfy men's carnal lusts and appetites, like brute beasts that have no understanding.'
> 
> The Speaker of the House of Commons in 1981 was the Welsh Labour politician Thomas George Thomas (hence 'Tommy Twice'). He was gay.
> 
> 'class-distinction-democracy-and-proper-drains': John Betjeman, ['In Westminster Abbey'](https://allpoetry.com/poem/8493441-In-Westminster-Abbey-by-Sir-John-Betjeman).


End file.
